While mainframe systems utilized in the business environments of today may be capable of handling a wide variety of both simple and complex tasks, any modifications that are to be made to these systems, including those providing new or enhanced functionalities, often carry long, costly, and tedious development cycles. Manual coding is often required, for example, when mainframe systems are modified to process service requests from new client-side systems utilizing unique communication formats or to retrieve data from databases with unsupported data formats.
Additional development may also be required where business rules must be created or altered. This is because in many modern mainframe systems, business rules are embedded within the operating code of the system, thereby requiring manual modifications to the code whenever business rules must be updated to comply with current business needs, regulatory requirements, or other rules. Similarly, code development must be undertaken when new user interfaces are required, including modifying the look and feel of the user interfaces and the data fields that are displayed.
For all of these reasons and others, modern mainframe systems often contain repetitive code fragments across the system with minor differences. As a result, when maintenance is required, the development cycle and costs are further expanded as each code fragment must be updated manually. The fragmented system development also leads to inconsistent data update and auditing across the system modules and inconsistent or incompatible cross-system communications.
Therefore, a solution is needed that simplifies the mainframe application framework for content publication and manipulation by improving current framework structures and designs to overcome these and other deficiencies.